View Single Post
  #9  
Old 02-12-2003, 11:25 PM
Mark Heide Mark Heide is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Illinois
Posts: 646
Default Re: Comparisons and degrees...

M,

The degree of censorship is only relative to your ideology. In a democratic and capitalist system you, as a US citizen, could view the former Pravda from the cold war era as 100% censorship. The citizens of a socialist society do not view it that way. Their press reflects the views of a collective society working together. The Russians did not grow up in a society built on materialism and getting rich, so their society is going to easily see US citizens as materialistic and greedy.

The only other analogy I can give you is from a religious point of view. There was a story recently in the news about a muslim woman in Africa that was sentanced to death by stoning. Well, this country consists of two religious groups which are the muslims and christians. Of course the christians rebelled against the muslims. But, for the muslims it is written in holy law that this women must be stoned to death for her crime(which was having a baby without being married). I seriously doubt that you could convince any of these muslims to spare her life, because if they did, they would be the ones defying holy law.

So degrees of censorship or even self-censorship can only be measured by your ideology.

Mark
Reply With Quote